Bit of an update here, got a faulty SR2 ROM board from Mo, and swapped the ROMs over to my Daytona board (turned out the ROM board was busted but the ROMs are fine) and whilst I'm still getting a black screen when I first power it on, after leaving it a couple of mins and cycling the power it boots up and plays fine. So I'm a bit unsure what to think. But at least its playable again.

Cool, glad you found out what one of the issues was.

It seems if these boards have not been kept cool then all it takes is a knock for them to throw errors. I had a D2 that I reshelled and when it came to playing it the GPU had a fault on boot up which then disappeared when it warmed up. Money down the drain by just moving the stack!

One thing to be aware of is that Virtual On : Oratario Tangram has additional service menu self test/s not found in any other game. Andy geezer showed me that a while back but I can't remember what test/s they are.

I managed to source a V.O.O.T security board and will get some roms burned when I get a reader/some roms. Andy actually has a couple of Virtual On 2/V.O.O.T security boards in his webshop, so if you are in for the long haul regarding Model 3 then owning a V.O.O.T sec+rom kit may be something that helps track down faults in the future.

Cool thanks for the tip, I have ordered a rom burner so that might be an option going forward. D2 PE has additional tests in the service menu, the TGP test and the boundary scan tests, which might prove useful, but I cant get that board to boot. I have read through that doc the Australian fella made and have found a couple of bits of info there that may prove useful.

This stack has always had an error when running the memory test on ic17, its not clear exactly what this relates to, I had always assumed that this was a RAM on the video board and that is what was causing my weird green lines glitch, however looking at that doc he has experienced a very similar error, and the cause was RAM chips on the video board with completely different IC numbers, he does state that when these chips die complexly the stack wont boot, so I guess its possible that my video board could also be the issue.

IC17 also exists on the CPU board, perhaps this error I get relates to that chip instead. The fella who wrote the doc does mention them specifically as scroll RAM, and indicates these can cause malloc errors on boot, and cause the game to crash.

I have ordered a cheapo hot air rework station and I think my plan is to replace the two SRAMS near the battery (I already have these, and a broken CPU board from Mo)

If this doesn't help I'm going to swap out ic17 on the CPU board with one from the other faulty CPU board and go from there.

Bit of an update here, hot air station arrived and have been having a bit of a play around with it. Have replaced the 2 srams nearest the battery, which didn’t seem to make any difference, and replaced the Ram chip ic17 on the CPU board, this one was showing as bad in the test screen and is now showing as good; however, this hasn’t improved anything as far as I can see.

I did also spot something which may be the cause of these on going issues, when the stack was on the worktop minus the rom board I noticed the pcb legs didn’t seem to be sitting flush on the worktop, with additional weight of the Rom board all the legs sit flush, I removed the middle leg supporting the centre of the stack and it looks to be fractionally longer than the other PCB legs.

This post supports the board near ic62, which according to the Australian fellas guide is a depth buffer ram and its failure can cause horizontal lines through some textures, which is the issue this stack has always had.

With this post removed and light pressure applied to the board, the texture issues disappear.

My thinking is perhaps this longer post had applied pressure to the chips on the video board and upset the solder joints, with the rest of the pcb legs bolted down securely, even the slight difference in height could flex the board, unfortunately reflowing the pins on ic62 doesn’t seem to have made any improvement so I don’t think it’s an issue with the pins, there are also 2 bga’s relatively close and I’m now thinking that perhaps they have contact issues, that would explain why the board seems to boot fairly reliably when its warm, but takes many attempts to boot from cold, but I don't think there is any way I have the skills to fix that.

Little update to provide closure to this thread, ended up buying a replacement CPU board from the Chinese fella on eBay, I figured it was a 50/50 chance it was CPU board related, and being the cheaper board it was worth a shot. The replacement CPU board seems to have fixed the issue, the board now boots reliably even from cold, although the graphics glitches still remain, its in a playable state.

A little bit of information I discovered the other day I thought it would be useful sharing here.

The additional test some games have is called the boundary scan test, As Vamino mentions above its present on the Virtual On board and also D2 PE, I have also discovered that it is also present on Virtua Striker 2 99.

I don't know about the other boards, but on VS2 99, it’s possible to boot into attract mode and access the boundary scan test without the security board in place, I ran the boundary scan tests twice once with the security board in place and once without it, and the results are the same.

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